May 31, 2009

From the User's Point of View

This last week I had a rare opportunity for a marketing person - the chance to be a member of my audience for a day.

I do a lot of web marketing. My mantra - the boring, stale, predictable question that I repeat constantly - is "What does the user want and need?" Followed-up by the equally boring, stale and predictable "What do we want the user to do?" Since I say it so often, I've come to believe that I really want the answer. But I had an experience this week that caused me to realize that I mostly just want to ask the question.

I also do email marketing and we have a system at work that is inadequate for our needs and downright frustrating to use most of the time. I've known for awhile that it needs to change, but it always just seems so much easier on email day to stick with the familiar. It's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't.

Finally, after trying to send a couple of urgent emails, through VPN, while on the road, I reached the end what I was willing to tolerate and decided to move to an independent online service provider. Which is how I found myself - on email day - with a commitment to launch something new, and neither the time nor the patience for anything unexpected or difficult. In other words, exactly like just about everyone who will ever use any of my websites.

I had become my audience.

This is what I learned through down-and-dirty, first-hand experience:

A website needs to be referrable. I didn't have time to research the best email options. That task had been on my list for months, sitting there at the bottom, leering at me. One of my colleagues just started using Constant Contact and loved it. She saw the trouble I was having and recommended it. I was willing to give it a try based on her say-so alone.

Users really are completely and totally impatient. It's one thing to know this intellectually and another to experience it for yourself. The day I decided to give Constant Contact a try was in the middle of a four-day week, I had the same amount of work as if it were five days, and I had an early evening appointment which meant I couldn't hang around if things went badly. This site had about 10 minutes to show me I could be successful, or I was done trying.

An online purchase needs to be risk-free. In an economy where everyone is watching expenses, I didn't want to commit any of my employer's money without knowing that the product was going to meet our needs. The link to the "Free Trial" was one of the first things I saw when I went to the home page. In two seconds, I knew I could at least take the next step and see what happened. So I did.

A website needs to be ridiculously easy to use. Customizing the Constant Contact templates was the easiest thing in the world to do. There were dozens of suitable choices, so I didn't have to settle for anything that wasn't just right. By the time I was prompted to make a purchase (because I had exceeded the image allotment for the free trial), I was sold. After purchase, I found that uploading my large email list took only a few seconds, the email was sent without a hitch, and the analytics were giving me the feedback I needed, but hadn't had before. If the service had failed on any of these points or even if it had caused me just a little frustration, I would have left - never to return.

So, the next time I ask anyone "What does the user want and need?" or "What do we want our visitors to do?", I'm going to remember my own experience take the time to get the right answer to that question.